The People Part of Working with People You Can’t Be With

• Use TableTopics to stimulate ‘little’ conversations to build rapport and learn about distributed team members. “One of the challenges with distributed teams is that you never have the ‘little’ conversations that build rapport. Conversations like: “Is golf a sport?” “A burger cannot be made of tofu.” Or “How would I look with a beard?” A recommendation I often make to virtual teams is to ask a ‘get to know you’ question at the start of every staff meeting. This sounds good in practice, but eventually you run out of questions. Well, that’s no longer a problem. TableTopics now sells box sets with 135 questions for US$25.” See TableTopics Original. What a cool idea! Anyone using these already?

The Technology Trends of Working with People You Can’t Be With

• Bill reviews Version 3.0 of ThoughtFarmer, a wiki-inspired intranet platform. “With its latest 3.0 release, ThoughtFarmer provides blogs, calendaring, discussions, document management, people profiles, search, security, tagging, version history, wikis, workstreams, and more. You can have free tagging like del.icio.us or closed tagging with a taxonomy. One example of closed taxonomies is the physician extranet “Primary Care Central” they deployed for the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. For example, to find a lab requisition on Primary Care Central, a physician can navigate by lab location, condition type, or requisition type. The tags help surface the same lab form in multiple, logical locations.” I need to look at this offering … ding! It’s added to my (long) list.
• GroupSwim added the ability to integrate a Google Doc into a GroupSwim discussion. “We use a Wiki for sharing requirements but sometimes Wiki’s fall short. In particular, they do not work well when dealing with the tabular style information of structured information that needs to be compared side-by-side or calculated; this is where spreadsheets shine.” They are thinking about tighter integration going forward, or the use of Zoho instead. It will be interesting to see whether this stays as an “integration” or whether another tool is embedded directly into the GroupSwim code base.

Insights on Being Productive and Effective

• Is your life filled with unwanted and unnecessary commitments? Then consider quitting. “Unwanted commitments seem to beget more unwanted commitments. They’re like lies: they multiply fast. If you take on an unwanted project to please your boss, then the next time a similar project comes by she’ll throw it in your lap. If you unhappily go to an acquaintances birthday party out of sense of obligation, they’re likely to invite you over for dinner, or call you more often. You get my drift.” Good solid advice in this one; but if you are going to quit the really big things in life, get independent advice.
• Matt contemplates the tensions of productivity, or in other words the things in your life that demand doing, and what we can do about it. “Given that we have these tensions in our lives, and that they cause some level of mental stress, how do we resolve them? There are two possibilities: Eliminate the source, or structure them so as to feel as if they’re eliminated.” Another spin on this is to purposefully create tensions that require us to do something. So be careful out there … eliminate the tensions you don’t want, and create the ones you do.
• To be world-class often means cultivating singular focus over the long haul. As Steve says, few people do so. “Few of us choose one thing and put all of our energy and effort behind it and that’s what it takes to be the best at something. I’ve seen it over-n-over-n-over again from music, to writing, to podcasting, to swimming, to running, to golf. Those who are so passionate about something that they devote ALL of their energy, effort and drive to it are the ones who emerge as the best.” A number of studies have put the “becoming an expert” investment at 10,000 hours. If it’s all you do for 5 years, you’re there!
• Celine compares and constrasts time-oriented and results-oriented work. “Sometimes it feels like the company owns your time, and that usually means that you work in a time-oriented office. Usually this is the regular 9 to 5 job where you log in and out of the office and your supervisors need to see you actually working. This type of work environment is traditional and comfortable – since this is how we’ve been doing things from the Industrial Revolution onwards. But a new type of workplace is emerging, one that is more results oriented and focuses on what you accomplish rather than how many hours you log in.” Count me in for the second approach! Note that it does make pricing strategy more amorphous.